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X AIDS: The failure of contemporary science. In his above-titled 1996 book on AIDS, Neville
Hodgkinson quotes David Quinn on page 335; The
scientific establishment ... bears an uncanny resemblance to Medieval
Christiandom. It is as totalist and unified in its world view as was the
Medieval Church. While heretical movements exist, as they did in the Middle
Ages, they are kept at the outer margins of the scientific world via various
time-honoured devices for maintaining doctrinal control such as censure,
ridicule and de facto excommunication. Organs such as Nature act as a sort of
Holy Inquisition. But the
early symptoms of a schism are beginning to develop. The authority of the
Catholic Church was challenged over an issue which is to us relatively
unimportant, i.e. the doctrine of justification. Yet once that authority was
successfully challenged on one issue, it did not take too long for the great
unified world view of the Middle Ages to unravel. One can envisage the
current scientific 'Magisterium' being successfully challenged over an issue
such as Aids, and then, with its credibility damaged, finding itself
challenged over a host of other issues. On page 393, Hodgkinson himself writes; Perhaps
when the illusions are shed and a clearer picture of Aids finally emerges,
the enormity of what went wrong will be turned to good advantage by the world
of science, as a catalyst for a radical rethink about its observational
methods, assumptions, and institutional checks and balances. I would argue that the Catt Anomaly is the simplest, best honed
focus for our attempt to analyse, reform and so save science before it is too
late. |
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